Wednesday, August 18, 2010

I was an anchor baby in 1958 when my parents came from China as immigrant students. They weren't citizens, but when I was born, I was automatically a citizen, and they could claim to be related to a US citizen to get their citizenship. Now I'm not that dead set against disallowing birth citizenship when neither parent is in this country legally. But here is an interesting piece on George Mason University's History News Network which seems to walk a fine balance between left and right. The interesting point is that it was the case of a Chinese that enshrined this right in the first place, and it was objections to Asians that sparked earlier attempts to restrict or get rid of birthright citizenship. I got this tip from the Adam Holland blog (who is a pro-Israel conservative as well as myself)

Repealing Birthright Citizenship Wasn't a Good Idea Back in the Forties Either

Our nation’s history demonstrates that birthright citizenship is a precious resource for nonwhite Americans, especially those of Asian ancestry, to protect against racial prejudice. Until the Second World War most Asian immigrants were excluded from entering the United States. Those who did come (of whom many would today be deemed “illegal immigrants”) were barred by federal law from naturalization. Under pressure from white nativists, Western states (including Arizona) enacted discriminatory laws against “aliens ineligible to citizenship” to eliminate their economic competition and stigmatize them as undesirable. However, in 1898 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Wong Kim Ark, a young Chinese American, and thereby enshrined the principle of automatic birthright citizenship for all native-born persons. American-born citizens of Chinese, Japanese, and other Asian groups, unlike their parents, were able to hold property and vote, and so were less vulnerable to official bias. In response, frustrated West Coast whites repeatedly attacked the principle of birthright citizenship for children of “ineligible” aliens

Monday, August 16, 2010

We've all heard about Elephant rifles but what about an Elephant-mounted Recoilless Rifle!

I heard this wild story about American special forces behind the lines in Vietnam. Seems that a forward firebase was getting harassing fire from 106mm recoilless rifles, but there weren't any roads for any vehicles that might have been carrying them, but they were moving all over the place between firings. So the special ops team sent to investigate found 2 elephants with 106mm recoilless rifles mounted on their backs which they had trained to aim and fire without freaking out somehow. A recoilless rifle is bazooka-looking thing that sends half of the blast energy backwards so that it has the punch of an anti-tank gun, but the "recoil" force is so low it can be mounted on something a light as a jeep, light tank, or in this case, a large beast. There were also 14 guys keeping them fed and for security. The Americans decided they had enough guys to "take care" of the enemy, reserving two LAWS rockets for each elephant. Now they were on the run for a week or so before they could be airlifted out after the NVA decided to retaliate against them, but they made it out OK. I've not seen anything on the internet remotely resembling this story, but it sounds believable.

Most complete TV treatment of the obscure but remarkable story of "Taffy 3", the tiny toy fleet left behind by Bull Halsey's mighty task force when it fell for a decoy. They left nothing but tiny destroyers and even tinier destroyer escorts to slug it out to defend their defenseless escort carriers from annihilation from the largest
Japanese fleet since Midway led by the formidable Yamato, the most powerful battleship in the world. Destroyer Johnston fearlessly andrecklessly charged headfirst to launch a suicidal torpedo salvo against cruisers. The Samuel B Roberts went down as the destroyer escort that fought like a battleship slugging it out with a much larger cruiser for over an hour before being sunk by other cruisers. The Dogfights Death of the Japanese Navy has better effects but is amuch shorter less complete account and both don't spend as much time on the pilots who probably contributed as much as the surface ships in harassing and driving off the superior force which in theory should have been able to steam right through them to destroy American landing
forces instead of being driven off with serious wounds and leaving behind a number of sunk or damaged capital ships.

History asks how Yamato would have fared against American battleships, but it was effectively defeated by a light escort task force meant to defend cargo ships against aircraft and submarines, and demonstrated the difference between the philisophy of making a few very big ships and highly skilled pilots, and cranking out lots of inexpensive ships with inexpensive aircraft and lots of moderately trained pilots and sailors.